Deputy Dean Ethan Bueno de Mesquita Discusses Research Standards for Economics

Harris Public Policy Sydney Stein Professor and Deputy Dean Ethan Bueno de Mesquita wrote a Forum Response for Boston Review, discussing the term "quantification" and how it contributes to imaginative confines, which in turn prevent effective policy. 

"We cannot divide the world into a neat dualism of aims and tools—the aims of public policy, on the one hand, and objective, quantitative tools used to pursue those goals, on the other," writes Bueno de Mesquite. "Instead, there is an inherent feedback between the two. How and what we quantify shapes and determines the aims of public policy, just as the aims of public policy shape and determine what we quantify."

Full coverage available at Boston Review.